Jeffrey Skoller, associate professor of film and media at UC Berkeley, is the author of Shadows, Specters, Shards: Making History in Avant-Garde Film

Best Film of 2012—Indiewire Critics Poll

A man bids his family goodbye as he heads off to work. Within the space of a day, he takes on a series of personalities, including a woman begging for money, a man on his deathbed, and a creature who lives in the sewers. In this audacious, surreal film, we shift from the everyday to the realm of science fiction, via the extraordinary roleplaying of Denis Lavant. For Carax, his invented world is “a way of telling the experience of a life without using a classical narrative, without using flashbacks. It's trying to have the whole range of human experience in a day.”

• Written by Carax. Photographed by Caroline Champetier. With Denis Lavant, Edith Scob, Eva Mendes, Michel Piccoli. (115 mins, In French with English subtitles, Digital video, From Swank Motion Pictures)